Front de Seine

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Virtually all French presidents like to erect monuments of some sort to memorialize themselves during their terms. In the case of Georges Pompidou, French president from 1969 to 1974, his monuments often took the form of skyscrapers in Paris. Pompidou, while an intelligent and able statesman and administrator, apparently had a bizarre desire to transform Paris into Manhattan-on-Seine, and he embarked on a program of ”adapting Paris to the automobile“ and building expressways and high-rise towers. He died of leukemia unexpectedly in 1974, before the completion of his horrific plans for Paris, and his successor, Valéry Giscard, cancelled everything. Unfortunately, some projects had already been completed, and the group of high-rise buildings called the Front de Seine is the result of one such project.

The Front de Seine is the group of buildings you see here in the background, on the Left Bank of the Seine River behind the Allée des Cygnes (a sort of narrow pedestrian path that runs down the middle of the river at this point from the Bir-Hakeim bridge, from which this photo was taken). The photo was taken in the late afternoon, and you are looking roughly south.

Most of the buildings date from the early 1970s. They look fine from this distance, but many look quite dismal close up. A large pedestrian plaza runs between many of the buildings nearest the camera, and while it may have been pretty when built, today it is in disrepair, with cracked tiles and pavement, broken ceilings on walkways, and so on. A very good example of urban blight, I think, and in very sharp contrast to other parts of Paris which are in vastly superior condition, even though some of them are ten times older. This deterioration is repeated in other areas of Paris subjected to these massive urbanization projects, such as the area around the place d’Italie.

The boats in the foreground are excursion boats that take tourists on tours up and down the Seine. The one on the left is one of the Bateaux-Mouches.

Photographed on May 26, 2001.